16 de janeiro de 2015

cantai cantigas / sing songs

http://www.cm-mdouro.pt/
 
 
Trás-os-montes, a poor region in the north of Portugal.
2 trips, one on the summer, another on the winter time, searching for people and songs.
Bruno, 8 years-old ‘sings with the tapes’.
 
sing02
 
Deolinda ‘walks with the cows’ and show us the village cemetery that ‘has a lot to see’. Ti Ana, 90 years-old, sings songs by the fire with the neighbors who ask her to ‘sing another one’. Oral tradition songs, learned from her mother and grand-mother, sang in ‘mirandes’ a local dialect. The songs tell us tragic stories that might remind one of Shakespeare.
 
sing03
I shot this documentary in 1999 but just finished it in 2006. I always thought I would go back there one day. What I shot in 1999 I thought would be the first step in my research, not the entire film, but I never went back there. It is a project that I was dedicated to, so I decided to look at the footage I had with an open mind, trying not to think about what I wanted to do by then, but just watch what was actually in the images.
 
I was surprised how things made sense. My affection for the persons I was shooting with and the respect I felt for those were in the images and it already had an inner flow. This was the first time I felt my images were so clear, sharp, with everything right inside. And I could listen to those songs forever… there’s something primal and essential in them, in the way people live and relate with the landscape, the Nature, the fire…

Jan Kubelik plays "Zephyr" by Hubay